Affect and Social Media #3

Date and time: Thurs May 25th 2017, 10am – 8.30pmLocation: The University of East London, Dockland’s campus (via Cyprus Station on the DLR)Keynotes: Jessica Ringrose (UCL) and Emma Renold (Cardiff)

The Event

In its third year now, the A&SM one day conference at UEL Docklands continues to get to grips with social media cultures.
In the first two events (captured in a forthcoming edited collection**) the call focused mainly on the manipulation of feelings, emotions and affect by social media marketing, but now, following recent events like Brexit and Trump, it is imperative to broaden the discussion to include the felt experiences, affective entanglements and emotional engagements of these unnerving times.

The 2017 conference brings together an intriguing international programme discussing:
- The affective politics of social media entanglements with e.g. Brexit, post-truth and strategic cyberbullying.
- Refugee and “Punch a Nazi” memes, Iranian sanctions and Trump’s tweets.
- Public affects and emotional consumption on Ebay, Twitter and Vine.
- Experiencing digital affect as grasped through the ideas of Simondon, Deleuze and Lévinas.
- The intersections between digital, art and affect
- Affective pedagogies and postfeminist resistances to social media events and affective overspills following the Orlando shooting and Trump’s election victory
Through our keynote speakers we also ask what can be learnt from these recent events and how we can effectively communicate to others whose lives are profoundly affected by (and made vulnerable to) the current acceleration of socially mediated molecular fascism.
The 2017 Sensorium includes artworks tackling digital memory, social media addiction, emotional recognition, inspirational memes quotes and a collaborative “zine” response to Trump.

See full programme of speakers and artists below
*Tickets are £3 for non-UEL students and £5 for people working outside of UEL. Price includes entry to the conference and art show with free drinks and nibbles.

**The first two A&SM events are now part of an edited book, Affect and Social Media (eds. Sampson, Ellis and Maddison), to be published as part of the Radical Cultural Studies Series with Rowman and Littlefield International in 2018. The book includes a foreword by Greg Seigworth and over 20 cutting edge contributions.

The Sensorium Art Show (Ground floor of the West Building)

Time - 5-9pmCo-curators - Dean Todd and Mikey Georgeson
Screen Time by Michael Day, Experiencing Metadata and Affect on Social Media by Steve Aishman, "Do You Like Cyber?" by Emilio Vavarella, Digital Storge by EL Putnam, Trump Zine exhibited by Carleigh Morgan, You are entirely up to you by Sophie Barr, A Real- Life Emoticon: Making Emotions by Marian Hepburn, The ruler-skirt-swing by Emma Renold, Entanglement as a physical proposition in a disentangled space by Anna Fairchild & Mikey B Georgeson, and Dean Todd.

Keynote biographies

Jessica Ringrose

Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education, at the UCL Institute of Education and co-Chair of the Gender and Education Association. Her work develops innovative feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity, affectivity and assembled power relations. Recent research projects explore digital feminist activism, teen feminism in schools, and young people’s networked sexual cultures and uses of social media. Her books include: Post-Feminist Education? (Routledge, 2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (EUP, 2013); Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (Palgrave, 2015); and she is currently working on two new books Gender, Activism and #FeministGirl (Routledge) with Professor Emma Renold, and Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight back against Rape Culture (Oxford University Press) with Dr Kaitlynn Mendes and Dr Jessalynn Keller).

Emma Renold

Emma Renold is Professor in Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. She is the author of ‘Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities’ (2005), Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation’ (with Ringrose and Egan, 2015) and ‘Agenda: A Young People’s Guide to Making Positive Relationships Matter’ (2016). She is currently working on a book project, ‘Gender Activisms and #FeministGirl’ with Professor Jessica Ringrose (Routledge forthcoming 2018). Inspired by new feminist materialist and queer posthumanist theory, her research investigates how gender and sexuality intra-act and come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Recent projects (see www.productivemargins.ac.uk) explore the affordances of co-productive, creative and affective methodologies to engage social and political change on young people’s experiences of gendered and sexual violence.

A&SM 3.0 Presenter Biographies

Panel OneHelen Powell is a Principal Lecturer and Head of Psychosocial Studies in the School of Social Sciences at the University of East London. Helen has written widely on the subjects of advertising and consumer behaviour and is currently working on the 4th edition of The Advertising Handbook (Routledge). Her interest in time and temporality commenced with her PhD which was later published as Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema (I.B.Tauris) and most recently she has explored temporal architectures as constructed through digital technologies in S. Prasad's Creative Mobile Media (2017). Helen adopts an interdisciplinary approach in her teaching, writing and research drawing particularly on literature, film and promotional culture.
Giuliana Tiripelli is a Researcher in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. She has done research about the role of the media in shaping social change, and she has taught in Sociology, Media, and Digital Society. She is interested in communication dynamics and strategies for social transformation in the digital age. http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/staff/tiripelli
Paul Reilly is Senior Lecturer in Social Media & Digital Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. Paul’s research focuses on the study of online political communication, with a focus on three key areas: (1) the use of social media by citizens to create and share acts of sousveillance (inverse surveillance); (2) the ways in which digital media can be used to crowdsource crisis information; and (3) the use of new media to reduce sectarian tensions and promote better community relations in divided societies such as Northern Ireland. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/staff/reilly
Zoë Shacklock is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research explores the role of kinaesthesia in contemporary serial television, focusing on questions of embodied affect, identity, and empathy. She has been published on Game of Thrones, Orphan Black, and Outlander.

Panel TwoAndrew Calcutt was a journalist and would-be record producer when in April 1981 rioting broke out down the road from his Brixton studio. Suddenly, making musical mash-ups no longer seemed like the frontline. More than three decades later, after thirty-something years in political mode, Andrew says he ‘has only recently returned to the aesthetic as the foremost expression of who we are and who we can be.’ The primary concern of his current work is to develop a form of journalism capable of capturing the contradictory character of people caught up in news stories, with the further aim of ‘projecting their particular actions onto the plane of our common humanity.’ Rising to the universal in this way, Andrew suggests, requires reporting that is both factual and imaginative.

Stephen Jukes is Professor of Journalism at Bournemouth University's Faculty of Media & Communication. His research focuses on areas of objectivity and emotion in news with an emphasis on affect, trauma and conflict journalism. He was previously a foreign correspondent and editor at the international news agency Reuters. During a series of overseas postings he covered or oversaw coverage of stories ranging from the ousting of Margaret Thatcher to the fall of the Berlin Wall, two Gulf Wars and September 11. In his final position at Reuters, he was Global Head of News and executive editor for a series of books on the Middle East conflict. He chairs the Dart Centre for Journalism & Trauma in Europe and is a trustee of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.

Anastasia Denisova is a Lecturer in Journalism at CAMRI, University of Westminster. Before starting her academic career, she worked as a journalist in Russia for over a decade. She has done research on the role of memes in the Russian alternative politics. Currently, she is looking at viral cultures in the Western digital society and the role they play in propaganda and populism. https://camri.ac.uk/staff/anastasia-denisova/

Jonas Fritsch, PhD, is Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the Digital Design department. His work centers on a creative thinking of interaction design, experience philosophy and affect theory through practical design experiments with interactive sound and physical interfaces. He is co-managing the DFF-funded project 'Affects, Interfaces, Events’. http://aie.au.dk

Jette Kofoed, PhD, associate professor in social psychology at the Department of Education, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Her work centers on affective processes of inclusion and exclusion in education, with an explicit focus on children and young people’s perspectives. Particularly her work centers on cyberbullying, intimacy and affectivity of photo-elicitation practices amongst youth on Instagram and Snapchat. Her work is based on virtual and offline ethnographies with children and young people. She is currently part of the DFF-funded project ‘Affects, Interfaces, Events’. http://aie.au.dk/

Camilla Møhring Reestorff, PhD, is associate professor in culture and media at the department of Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus, Denmark. She is director of the Center for Cultural Participation (AU) and Editor-in-Chief of “Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation”. Her work centers on political participation and affectivity and she studies the ways in which different participants – from politicians to activist and artists – mediatize their practices and engage in affective politics. Her forthcoming book – “Culture War: Affective Cultural Politics, Tepid Nationalism and Art Activism” – concerns the development of affective politics and new forms of both nationalism and protest. She is part of the DFF-funded project ‘Affects, Interfaces, Events’. http://aie.au.dk/

Thomas Sutherland is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Lincoln. He previously received his PhD in the Media and Communications programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/tsutherland

Panel ThreeRobert Wright is a PhD Student from the Art, Philosophy and Social Practice research group in CADRE: the Centre for Art, Design, Research and Experimentation, based at the University of Wolverhampton. He holds an MA in Popular Culture, whose thesis looked at the confluence of Hauntology and Technology under a backdrop of increasing austerity following the 2008 economic crisis; and his current PhD project is titled: Magic and Cybernetics in 21st Century Capitalist Cyberspace: A Theoretical Study into the Occulted Socio-cultural effects of Algorithms, Social Media and Big-Data.

Bahar Nasirzadeh is pursuing her Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at York University in Toronto, Canada. She received her master’s degree in Graphic Design in 2014, and is currently teaching part time in art and design at Centennial College. Nasirzadeh’s field of research concerns new media politics; affect; surveillance; and graphic design and digital labour. Her current research focuses on the way networked media function to modulate public’s collective affectivity and perception as part of the mechanism of securitization, and that at the same time in the way they enable public’s collective affectivity and action to create a new form of mediation.

Sara Tafakori is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester researching the emotional politics of sanctions on Iran. In her pre-migratory life as a journalist and reporter in Iran, her commentaries and articles featured in national newspapers and journals. Her interests include emotion and affect, migration, gender and sexuality, the intersection of social media and the politics of belonging and nationalism.

Elena Pilipets is university assistant at the Department of Media and Communications at the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria. She studied cultural studies and media theory at the University of Klagenfurt where she currently works on her PhD project about serializations in digital culture. Her research and teaching focus is on media/cultural studies, affective turn and actor-network theory.

Scott Wark is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. His PhD research, ‘Meme Theory’, examines contemporary cultural production through the internet meme.

Panel FourIan Tucker is Reader in Social Psychology at the University of East London. He has a long standing interest in the social psychological aspects of emotion and affect, which has theoretically informed empirical work in the areas of mental distress, social media and surveillance. He has conducted research for the Mental Health Foundation and the EPSRC Communities and Culture Network+, and is currently working on a project exploring the impact of social media on psychological support in mental health communities. Ian has published numerous articles in the areas of mental health, social media, space and place and surveillance.

Darren Ellis is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader of Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London. His research has led to both theoretical and empirical advances in emotional disclosure studies, surveillance studies, and more recently experiences of social media use. Darren co-authored a book with Dr Ian Tucker in 2015 entitled Social Psychology of Emotion. This book re-thinks the social psychology of emotion by introducing philosophical theories that are often considered outside the remit of psychology and so attempts to expand its repertoire. Darren is presently co-editing a book which has come out of this seminar series entitled Affect and Social Media. In this series, he has drawn on the process philosophy of Albert North Whitehead to think about ‘personal information’ and the use of ‘emoticons’ within social media activity. He is presently writing a monograph entitled Emotion in the Digital Age, wherein he is exploring emotion and affect in the contexts of artificial emotion, social media, digital surveillance, online support, and video gaming. The paper that he will be giving at this conference, critiques the application of a number of ‘motivation’ theories and concepts that attempt to further ‘understand’ social media use, and explores notions of ‘desire’ that have derived from Leibniz, Nietzsche and more recently Deleuze and Guattari.

Jacob Johanssen (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster, UK. His work revolves mainly around two themes: exploring psychoanalysis as a theory and method for media audience research with a particular focus on affect, as well as using psychoanalysis to think critically about contemporary digital culture more broadly. His research interests include media audiences, reality television, social media, affect theory, psychosocial studies, critical theory. Recent publications include Digital Media, Psychoanalysis and the Subject (edited with Steffen Krüger, CM: Communication and Media Journal Special Issue) http://aseestant.ceon.rs/index.php/comman/issue/view/467/showToc

Diana Garrisi is a Lecturer in Communication, Media and Culture at the University of Oxford Brookes and a research associate at the University of Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute. She holds a PhD from the University of Westminster with a thesis on the news portrayal of dermatology in the Victorian press. Her research interests include: journalism, media coverage of science, in particular media representation of skin diseases, and the popularization of dermatology in nineteenth-century newspapers. She is co-investigator with Dr Jacob Johanssen for the research project 'Facial Disfigurement in the UK Media: From Print to Online' (2017, funded by the University of Westminster Strategic Research Fund).

Panel FiveHeidi M. Aishman is an independent curator originally from the northeast of the United States, she is currently based in London. Aishman is currently a PhD researcher in the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme at the University of Reading in conjunction with the University if the Arts Zurich. Her most recent position was as Fall Curator in Residence at the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in Atlanta, in the US where she curated 2 mutli-person exhibitions including community workshops and a lecture series. She has curated exhibitions in the US as well as internationally in Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong. She has been awarded several grants for her work with underserved communities from organisations such as The Puffin Foundation, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. Aishman has also been a contributing writer for the online arts journal Big, Red and Shiny.

Paul O’Brien is an AHRC student at the University of Glasgow and has recently submitted his PhD thesis on postphenomenology in cinema, new media art and computer gaming. His work explores the composure of narrative between the body and technology across these contrasting media. Paul completed an MA in Film and Screen Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011 (also funded through the AHRC) and hold a first class honours degree and award for outstanding achievement at the University of Greenwich (2008).

Steve Aishman is currently an MPhil/PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art. Aishman was recently the Photography Professor and Dean of Academic Services at Savannah College of Art and Design (Georgia/Hong Kong). Aishman has taught photography and cultural theory at institutions such as Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Aishman has his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics from Princeton University and his Masters in Photography from Tufts University. His work has appeared in over 100 juried solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Boston Center for the Arts, the Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, and the Dorrego Art Center in Dorrego, Argentina, among others. His most recent solo show “The Aishmans” was held at Pinnacle Gallery, Savannah, GA.

Panel SixAnna Murray is a graduate student who has recently completed her MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College. Her research focuses on feminism, postfeminism, and media representations of gender and sexuality. Her master’s dissertation examines the turn to feminism which has been occurring in celebrity circles since 2014, asking how this turn can be understood when read through feminist/postfeminist theory. Her investigations led her to question the role affect might play in such theoretical readings and whether, perhaps, it is at times insufficiently considered. In her case study of Beyonce’s (2016) visual album, Lemonade, she attempts to reconcile the gaps between theory and the affectual responses which are arguably made quasi-tangible through social media responses to such a popular culture event.

Kate Marston is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Childhoods at Cardiff University. Kate’s doctoral research explores the digitally-mediated relationship cultures of young people in England and Wales. In particular, she is interested in what arts-based and creative methodologies, as well as post-humanist and post-structuralist feminist theories can bring to research on young people’s digital cultures. Alongside her doctoral research, Kate works with a number of voluntary sector agencies on projects promoting gender and sexual equality in schools.

Carleigh Morgan is a former Fulbright scholar and current PhD candidate at King’s College, London. Her dissertation explores the interfacial relationships between bodies and machines, with emphasis on the digital mechanisms that program subjects as legible by computer technologies. In 2016 she graduated with a Distinction from KCL’s MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory programme for her work on algorithmic error and accident in digital artworks. Personal interests include writing object-oriented erotica and sending romantic dispatches to bots on Twitter, performances that are anchored in her interest in AI and leveraging digital networks to foster creative communication between humans and robots. She currently works as a research assistant at the Centre for Digital Culture where she organizes national and international events that examine digital technologies, political futures, and post-capitalist imaginaries, and is an active speaker at conferences spanning STEM and the Arts and Humanities. She has several publications forthcoming. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/carleigh-morgan(7a45536d-253d-4426-b823-3660e76d8f45)/biography.html

Sensorium Artist Biographies

Sophie Barr is an artist and lecturer in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL and the School of Media and Communications at London College of Fashion. Sophie is interested in ‘vernacular’ visual cultures that exist in both electronic networked environments as well as in the streets of the global city. She investigates these subjects through photography, video and installation as well as research and writing. Sophie is currently studying for a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art at UEL. You can find out more about her recent projects at her blog Intellectual Simulation at https://sophiebbarr.wordpress.com/.

Michael Day is an artist and researcher based in Sheffield. His art practice is focused on digital technologies and the potential implications of their increasing entanglement with all aspects of contemporary experience. He has exhibited and screened work in recent exhibitions including Possession at Bangkok Cultural and Arts Centre (2013), Deadpan Exchange VIII at Casa Maauad, Mexico City (2014), and Sluice__2015 at Oxo Tower Wharf, London (2015). He has participated in the digital art festivals FutureEverything in Manchester (2010) and Piksel in Bergen (2009), and has undertaken residencies with Hull Time-based Arts (2005) and PVA Medialab (2009) in the UK, and with Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (2011) in Trondheim, Norway. He is a senior lecturer in fine art at Staffordshire University. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Sheffield Hallam University, where his research is concerned with experiences of distractibility that are said to have emerged alongside the recent widespread adoption of digital communications technologies.
Marian Hepburn (UEL)

Steve Aishman is currently an MPhil/PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, Aishman was recently the Photography Professor and Dean of Academic Services at Savannah College of Art and Design (Georgia/Hong Kong). Aishman has taught photography and cultural theory at institutions such as Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Aishman has his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics from Princeton University and his Masters in Photography from Tufts University. His work has appeared in over 100 juried solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Boston Center for the Arts, the Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, and the Dorrego Art Center in Dorrego, Argentina, among others. His most recent solo show “The Aishmans” was held at Pinnacle Gallery, Savannah, GA.

Anna Fairchild is a UK based artist who spent 12 years living in Istanbul, Turkey from the 1990s. Seen and felt experiences in the cultural and geographical contrast between Turkey and the UK and our developing interaction with digital technology became key themes in her work. The return to apparently familiar social and geographical space and the experience of digital spaces inform the subject, methodology and mapping in her practice. Anna’ work explores our emotional and affecting engagement with physical and digital spaces and changes on geographies of memory. Through relational engagement with materials, milieu forms and images map elements of larger geographies. Scanning, photography and direct casting processes freeze embodied knowledge in iterative, not quite duplication. “I can explain what I did, but not what happened”. Anna Fairchild’s work hovers between poetic, emotional engagement and science investigation, where there is intent in the work, but no necessarily anticipated effect.

Mikey Georgeson is an artist, working in various media. As a painter he exhibits his work at Sartorial Contemporary Art. His painting “Dopamine Molecule of Intuition” was recently in the John Moore’e painting prize. His documentary The Deadends – In Search of Truth was screened at the ICA to mark 100 years of Dada. As "the Vessel", he is songwriter and singer of the cult art-rock band, David Devant and his Spirit Wife.

Dean Todd Since the early 1990s Dr Dean Todd has used photography, film, video, presentations/installations and interactive performances in his art practice. Using crowds, groupings, and assemblages of people, he has created and curated works in all kinds of gatherings: carnivals, festivals, pubs, clubs, theatres, galleries, sports events and political rallies.

Emilio Vavarella is a media artist-scholar whose work merges interdisciplinary art practice and theoretical research and is centered around the study of the relationship between humans and technological power. Emilio is currently working toward a PhD in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. He has exhibited at prestigious festivals of media arts: Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media (2017, 2016); BAM - Media Art Biennale (2015); NYEAF - New York Electronic Arts Festival (2015); EMAF - European Media Art Festival (2014), JMAF - Japan Media Arts Festival (2014); esteemed venues such as Villa Manin (2016); Museo Nacional Bellas Artes in Santiago (2015); National Art Center of Tokyo (2014); Jarach Gallery (2014); Eyebeam Art and Technology Center (2013); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (2013). His work has featured in books such as The New Aesthetic and Art and Behind the Smart World and also appeared in Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Visual Culture, and Visual Communication Quarterly as well as Wired, Artforum and Neural.

EL Putnam (Dr. Emily Lauren) is a visual artist, scholar, and writer working predominately in performance art, video, sound, and interactive media. Her work draws from multiple themes and sources, including explorations of gender and sexuality, play, materialism, and the study of place, which she investigates through personal and cultural lenses. Her writing and research focuses on continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, digital studies, feminist theory, and examing the influence of neoliberalism on artistic production. EL has actively been presenting artworks and performances in the United States and Europe for the past decade, and has been a member of the Mobius Artists Group since 2009. She is currently part-time faculty at Maynooth University.

The Sensorium will also feature an artwork by our keynote, Emma Renold, and Panel Six presenter Carleigh Morgan’s Trump Zine.